With the increasing importance of the Internet as a commercial infrastructure and the increasing need for massive Internet based services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the operation of the IP network is becoming more important and complex than ever. Current Internet architecture is mostly based on the best effort (BE) model, where packets can be dropped indiscriminately in the event of congestion. Such an architecture attempts to deliver all traffic as soon as possible within the limits of its abilities. The BE model works well for some applications such as FTP and email. To attract more users, Internet service providers (ISPs) provides not only best-efforts services such as email but also various newly emerged real-time multimedia applications such as VoIP, Video-Conferencing and Video on-Demand (VoD). To this end, various technologies such as stream categorizing and traffic monitoring are utilized to meet QoS requirements associated with various IP based services.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.